Sermon Preached at St. John's V Epiphany

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Sexagesima) year C

Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13
I Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

Today’s propers are obviously about conversion. I find it singularly instructive that all of the objects of today’s Scripture lessons are people who had been initiated into the people of God by appropriate sacramental observances carried out at the appropriate times of their lives. Isaiah was a good and observant Jew. Certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day and participated regularly in the Passover and the other feasts of God’s people. At Corinth, Paul was addressing Christians who had been baptized and were presumably regular in their attendance upon the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Luke spoke of Jesus coming to Peter, James, and John, all good and observant Jews, like Isaiah. Even King David in today’s Psalm speaks of experiential meetings with God subsequent to his Circumcision as a child.
So, what do today’s lessons say about the sacraments of the Church? Are they of no use? Are they merely forms that we go through in order to mark the turning points of our lives in the hope that there is a God who cares for us? Heaven forbid and perish such thoughts from our minds! The sacramental ceremonies of Circumcision and Passover, which are fulfilled prophetically in the Christian Gospel Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, are means of imputed grace instituted of God and commanded us as outward signs of that inward and spiritual grace given us by a loving heavenly father. When you receive a sacrament, it is as if God plunges a syringe filled with grace into your arm, and you are given a bracing dose of that spiritually enabling favor which only comes from Him who has made you and named you as His own. If you receive it well, in obedience and with love towards God and man, your soul is refreshed and strengthened. If however you receive it poorly, without thought or consideration and with no intention of living a well examined and obedient Christian life, you receive the life giving sacrament to your damnation. So saith the Apostle.
To us Christians, Baptism and Holy Communion are life giving sureties of our membership in Christ, and of God’s favour usward. And so what is this “conversion” demanded of and experienced by the players in today’s Scripture lessons? It is in short a turning, a going the other way, a transformation so radical that we can never again be the same. I find it interesting that those whose transformations are chronicled in the lessons all came face to face with the living God in a way which revealed His glory and underlined their own inadequacy. Isaiah’s vision of the very throne of God, David’s realization of God’s mighty deliverance, Paul’s recounting of the power of the eyewitness accounts to the resurrection of the Christ, and the Apostles’ personal experience of what they knew to be an absolutely inexplicable miracle- all of these events led to an humble acknowledgement of the individual’s need for God in the immediate present.
There is a pattern here which is replicated so many times in the Bible:
1. God reveals himself to a human being.
2. That human being recognized that he, or she, has come into the presence of God.
3. The mystery of God’s holiness overwhelms the vision’s or experience’s recipient and leads to an immediate acknowledgement of personal human insufficiency, or what we generally name humility.
4. The recipient gains an immediately increased appreciation of their need to be closer to God, of His overall plan for human history, and of their own place in it.
5. The recipient is changed forever, as are their habits and their passions, and they come to see themselves as the very ministers of God on Earth.
And now we come to the question. Everyone here has been baptized. Everyone here is at least moderately regular in attendance upon the holy Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. But, have you come face to face with the living God? Have you met Him in a way which is unmistakable and life altering? Granted, not everyone is called to be an Isaiah or a Peter, but there is ample evidence in the Bible, and in the history of our Holy Mother the Church that God calls all who will receive Him to a life of continual conversion, transformation, and setting apart for His particular use. It should be the desire of us all to seek such an experience of the living God that the comfort which leads to complacency shall never be known among us who bear the sign of the cross. The evidence of the Scriptures tells us that God chooses the time and place and manner of his appearance to each of us. It also teaches us that like Hannah, who went every year before the shrine of God to seek His face, we are called to yearn for this transforming experience, this overwhelming revelation of His glory.
And so this day, as you come faithfully to receive that sacrament which gives us strength and assurance that we are God’s own, I bid you to pray that the heavens might be opened, and that God would grant you such an experience as Isaiah had that day; an experience which will change your life forever and send you forth to do the work of the kingdom with a fervor and an intensity that you have not known. Pray that he will allow you to see your own needs, your own sins, and that He will forgive you, wash your conscience, and give you the grace to walk in obedience to His commands. Pray that he will imbue you with a sense of gratitude which will make humility and godly sobriety the characteristics of your life. Pray that he will grant you a glimpse of His purpose being fulfilled in human history, in the events all around us, and that He would help you to see your purpose and mission in the same. Today, as you come in faithfulness to receive the blessed sacrament which is His gift to all Christians, God calls you to be so much more. Seek Him now, while he may be found, and claim the inheritance and the mission prepared for you before the foundations of the world were laid. AMEN.